Pixar Grants Dying Kid's Last Wish to See "Up"

Pixar flew an employee with a DVD of the animated feature film "Up" (which is only in theaters right now) to the home of a terminally ill child for a private viewing. The girl passed away soon after fulfilling this last wish.

Colby Curtin, a 10-year-old with a rare form of cancer, was staying alive for one thing - a movie. From the minute Colby saw the previews to the Disney-Pixar movie Up, she was desperate to see it. Colby had been diagnosed with vascular cancer about three years ago, said her mother, Lisa Curtin, and at the beginning of this month it became apparent that she would die soon and was too ill to be moved to a theater to see the film.
After a family friend made frantic calls to Pixar to help grant Colby her dying wish, Pixar came to the rescue.

104 Responses to “Pixar Grants Dying Kid's Last Wish to See "Up"”

I have but one question: Wouldn’t it have been easier and saved everybody a lot of trouble if they just downloaded the movie like everybody else does? I’m sure they have some pathological media pirate teenager living nearby, just about every neighbourhood has one.

“At the time of her death, her stomach was about 94 inches around, swollen with fluids the cancer wouldnâ€™t let her body properly digest. The rest of her body probably weighed about 45 pounds… Colby couldn’t see the screen because the pain kept her eyes closed…”

Imagine now, instead you get an email. It says, there is a girl who will probably die within a week or so. Her last wish is to see “Up”.

You have exactly two options.

1) Do nothing.

Not exactly sensible, since the story will spread like a wildfire on the internet.

2) Let her see the movie at home.

Since the first option was perfectly impossible, it has to be this one.

But what exactly is the merit of not being out of your mind? Especially since it hardly took any effort to do it. OK, they went out of their way to ensure that no advance copy of the DVD would be made and spread on the internet, but other than that?

The point is, the situation could never arise, if studios sold DVDs at the release date or offered them for download. The parents would have went to the shop and bought it, or got it from the internet.

Today, *this* is the common sense solution and it has *more* merit than any public relations stunt.

I certainly wouldn’t give a mayor any credit for going out of his way to organize shelter for *one* of 734 homeless people in his town. But I do give credit to any mayor who manages to ensure shelter for everyone, so that such extraordinary acts of magnanimity are *not necessary* in the first place.

To me it feels like someone is trying to show magnanimity by letting a few people drink water for free *after* having bought up all the local supply and selling it for $50 a gallon. Would you *then* accuse me of not praising the magnanimity of that businessman?

Mind you, the situation would have been different 60 years ago. When movies were shown in cinema because not everyone had a TV and copies of movies were invariably big, clunky and expensive. Showing a movie to someone at home would have involved making a special 9mm copy and bringing the necessary equipment to the home.

Today, there is no extra effort involved. Everything is digital anyway! And in fact, there was much more effort involved in *ensuring* that the girl could *not* see the movie she wanted to see, than in making that “grand gesture” of letting her see it in a private viewing *despite* all the efforts to prevent just that.

My feelings go out for the girl. But I do not share the feelings for Pixar a lot of people here express, nor do I think anyone should.

Excuse my ignorance, but is there a reason why she wasn’t given something for the pain? I can’t even begin to imagine what kind of pain she was in. (I cried like the dickens when I had a kidney stone.) Was she just in so much pain that even pain killers wouldn’t work? Or would pain killers knock her out so she couldn’t remain conscious during the movie? To me it seems wrong to let anyone be in that much pain if there is something that can be done about it. Kudos to Pixar for doing something like this.

Well, that made me sob. Touching story. Pixar is 7,000 kinds of awesome.

Oh, and to echo others, TP1024, this little story isn’t really the best place to rant at the movie business and society, is it? Occasionally, I like to check my cynicism at the door, and cry a little for a ten year old who got to watch a fun movie hours before she died, regardless of whether it was a P.R. stunt or not. It feels good. You should try it sometime.

It’s not uncommon for people to be in so much pain that any sufficient dose of painkillers would be fatal, or would essentially knock them out.

In fact this is the area where the law gets a little vague. It is a kind of open secret that doctors will give terminally ill patients in massive pain, doses of morphine sufficiently large that will shorten the patient’s life, but also manage the pain.

I think it’s called the double effect defence. So long as the primary purpose was to relieve suffering, no-one prosecutes. I’m sure there are doctors on BB who can give a better explanation.

Pain management is a lot harder than many people realise. There are levels of pain that even the strongest medication has trouble mitigating. I don’t ever want to be in that situation. I can’t imagine how hard it must have been for a 10 year-old.

I lost my wife (age 31) to cancer last year and near the end, the pain medications made her really incoherent and sleepy. It was a huge effort to remain conscious. She chose to go off of them so she could remain as coherent as possible. I have a feeling that this little girl might have made the same choice so she would be awake for her last few hours on earth.

When I saw UP in the theater, the themes of love and loss and hopes for the future really hit home. The movie deals with these issues deftly with real depth and feeling.

I give huge credit to Pixar for acting quickly and granting her wish. They weren’t just helping one dying girl. Her family can feel comforted that she got her final wish fulfilled. When you lose someone so young, the weight of unrealized dreams weighs heavily on the people who loved her. This experience may have lightened that burden.

#67 the lack of response would not be a story, it’d be a non-story.. unless the quierer in question is an attention whoring idiot who decides to spazz out about it.

Regardless of the true motives behind it, this particular request was handled with class and not actively exploited. That’s reason enough to cheer Pixar. It was a sweet, kind thing to do. Even if it was vaguely business minded, so frigging what? it still made th kid happy.

Or does being an angry, bitter cynic mean so much more to you than a dying child’s happiness?

If that’s the case.. I feel for you. Genuinely.

Furthermore its bloody IRRELEVANT what the current state of DVD sales is. You’re making a political point and applying it to a SPECIFIC INSTANCE, as if the DVD thing could have been magically instalntly solved as soon as the company heard about this girl, which is ABJECTLY nonsensical. You CANNOT judge the company based on “well, wouldnt it it be better if common practice had it this way!!!” in some dream ideal of your own, in regards to a current, specific, interest. To quote Spock, that would be “Highly illogical.”

Fact: she was too sick to go to a theatre.

Fact: Pixar acquiesced to screening the movie in her home, though, due to the current movie system, the movie isn’t currently available on DVD or the internet (legally).

Fact: Pixar helped this little girl’s last few hours be a little happier. REGARDLESS of motive.

A good deed was done here, man. I am quite sure Pixar isn’t complaining about the resulting good press, but it seems unlikely to me it was done specifically for that reason.

Patients sometimes reduce their pain meds for a brief time so that they can focus on something. We had a patient who would go off her morphine for a couple of hours every week so that she could watch Seinfeld with a clear head.

She’s not related to me in any meaningful way. She’s not to related to anyone I know. She’s not from any community I belong to, apart from the very abstract “North Atlantic culture sphere.”

And I do not react very emotionally to the written word. (It’s different with movies.)

Therefore I’m indeed unable to really grief (I mean the real kind, with real emotional pain) for her. Otherwise I’d have to grieve for all the kids on this planet who die right now because they do not get treatments which are dirt-cheap over here, who hunger, who get beaten to death, etc.

Pus, I’m German. Our communication channels and how we express certains states of mind are quite different from English-speaking folk.

One of the comments at the OC register page for this story indicated that the people who did this did not necessarily have official authorization.

If true, I wouldn’t say this reflects poorly on Pixar. Just the opposite — the corporate culture at Pixar must be such that people somewhere in the middle or lower have values and initiative to make something like this happen fast.

props to the family friend Terrell Orum-Moore here… i’m sure there are real people able and willing to respond to real and urgent human need within most organisations, but these days it too often requires superhuman determination and perseverance to make contact with them… Terrell Orum-Moore was a true friend to Colby and her family.

This is the 3rd gut wrenching news I’ve read/heard in the past 12 hours and I’m not even looking at news… friend of a friend’s suicide, friend of a friend loses an infant to some genetic disease and now this….. count your blessings is the message here.

First of all, cudos to Pixar! .. wow .. not afraid of pirating or a lost ticket and no rape of a PR option ..

and then .. icy veins and sarcasm and constant internet doubt … how do we know the story is true? what a cute picture of a slender caucasian girl with possible latino or asian mix .. what if the pic was of a fat boy of ethnicity not that high in profile??? coincident?

But then again .. I trust in Pixar and I’d love to work for a place that is so no BS, where you can make your dreams come true (by telling compelling stories) and you can make many others dreams come true …

I just watched UP last night and this story made me tear up .. again …

“Who are the jerk-a-zoids that didn’t get her a wheelchair when she asked for it?”

The problem with the hospices is that a lot of them are volunteer, most are overworked. The last thing the US thinks about are those dying.

It would be nice to help everyone, and I know some people that work in these settings that TRY to do just this — until they burn out themselves and can’t do it anymore.

If you find this a horrible thing, please sign up to volunteer at one of these facilities. Give a realistic amount of hours you can do it and don’t do any more…and make certain that you show up when you say you will regardless of the pain you might be going through doing so. Might be one of the most rewarding things you’ve ever done.

OK, look its horrible seeing that photo and hearing that she passed away at such a young age. However, I am contractually obliged to offer the following Cynic’s Opinion:

wow, the dying wish of the movie’s target group is to see this movie. Leaving aside the sort of sad comment on our society that the last wish of a youth is a commercial product, could Pixar ever dream of a better movie endorsement slash PR maneuver?

at least her wish wasn’t to go to Disneyland: i cant stand the Make-A-Wish foundation with their “We’ll grant you any wish as long as it is Going to Disney.”

Remember, this isn’t my opinion. It’s some cynical dude’s opinion who made me type it in for him.

@markin Strangely, I do not find her dying “horrible” and the story doesn’t move me to tears. She’s not of my kind and many people die at that age, from accidents, malnutrition and sickness. I don’t even consider it “unfair” in this case – apparently she got all the help society could provide to fight the cancer.

But I’m absolutely perplexed at the vitriolic remarks how this was happenes, though I’m astonished that no atheists stepped forward to shout “where’s your god now”?

Just out of curiousity, what “should” she have made to appease for thoughts on that matter, to provide a better comment about society?

I mean, the opera’s no option, that’s commercial. As are what most art museums hold.

Asking for pen and paper to write to the world leaders to ask for a day of peace?

Some perspective please. Yes, she wanted to watch a cartoon movie. Big deal. She was a *kid*, fer chrissakes. Kids like to play outside, to watch TV, to play computer games and have good time.

Expecting such a kid to act differently is not cynism, it’s dumb.

And realistically, what should “Pixar” have done? Even under the assumption that their commercial interest in that matter takes precedence upon all else, they had the choice to ignore the request (and be despised by the people who now praise them) or grant it and be dissed by some because “they did it only for the PR value.” However, I doubt that they gave it that much thought, because there’s very probably people working at Pixar and not machines.

@boinkology
What Paul said, also her cancer apparently shut down systems that metabolize medications, so any more meds may have had additional potency that might have been immediately fatal. She may well have been on as much pain meds as her body could stand. Cancer pain sucks.

Saw “Up” yesterday, it was excellent, appreciated by kids and adults. It also deals with flavors of loss in positive ways, but it wasn’t at all a sad film. Good on Mom for outflanking the automated telephone system and good on Pixar.

I thought about it yesterday when I read the post. But I felt it’d be more trolling than anything else. Don’t you think it would’ve been a low blow? You see, even if I’m an atheist, I have a sense of morals… uh, no screw it: WHERE’S YOUR GOD NOW?!

@failix What I meant was that she wasn’t deprived of existing, accessible help, therefore she got the fairness society could provide. Another fairness does not exist.

I’m an atheist, too. That’s exactly why I think that maximizing her enjoyment of her last hours – not “on Earth”, but her last hours *ever* – was a very good thing. She got a wish fulfilled and even though it may be just some more-or-less cheap thrill to any moviegoer with disposable income, it was profound to her.

I just deleted an paragraph. I also deleted the first sentence of why I deleted it. Both were indirect arguements and I’ll simply state that I think it’s wrong to instrumentalize a current case such as this.

Hmmm… on the one hand this is a nice gesture from a major company who could quite easily have denied the request on “copyright” and “piracy” fears. We appear to have a top-class company here and a tragic story that at least ends with the girl getting her dying wish.

On the other hand, I really do have to agree with the other posters here. It’s a marketing stunt. The only reason why a DVD had to be specially couriered to the girl is because of the ridiculous and outdated business model that artificially restricts access to the movie. It’s because the entertainment industry can’t even bring themselves to compete on the same playing field as the so-called pirates that the situation even existed where this girl couldn’t see a legal DVD or download in the first place.

That’s not to diminish the heart-warming nature of this story. But, when you get to the core of this story, what we’re talking about is a Hollywood studio circumventing Hollywood’s own totally unnecessary, self-imposed restrictions. While it’s a nice gesture, it’s not exactly as good as allowing all the non-dying people who want to watch the movie but can’t make it to the cinema to do so.

Oh, and the even more cynical part of me parses this sentence FTA “The employee left after the movie, taking the DVD with him” as meaning “Sorry guys we know you’re grieving your dying daughter, but we still think you’re potential thieves who will rip us off if the DVD leaves our sight”. Not sure what that means. Probably that I’ve been hearing excuses from these people for too long instead of fixing the reasons people want to “pirate” in the first place.

So, kudos to Pixar. Hollywood/RIAA: fix your stupidly counter-productive and broken business models that make this sort of thing necessary in the first place.

The people at Pixar ar high-class all the way. I had the pleasure of meeting with them and collaborating on some business, and this can-do, no-nonsense approach permeates their entire organization. I love the company even more for what they did for this girl, and will remember it forever.

Add my kudos to Pixar for doing this, but their silence may be attributable to something other than humility…

If this became common knowledge (that is, Pixar will send a representative to screen movies to sick/dying children), they’d be overwhelmed with requests. Clearly they wouldn’t be able to accommodate all of them, but they’d look like a jerk if they ignored even one.

So, how do they help without putting themselves in an impossible position later? Do what they did, but keep quiet about it.

I’ve right now got a bad case of poison ivy. One of my eyes is swollen up so I can’t see through it. This puts that in complete perspective. I feel so sorry for this little girl and her family. And seriously, good for Pixar for doing this.

my child is a cancer survivor.she is now a healthy and beautiful teenager but she still fights the battle everyday. god, medicine and love saved her. every moment with her she inspires me to be the best i can be.i cant imagine what colbys family feels.my heart aches for the family and colby. she is with the little angels now. god needs her too. pixar was great. but please dont forget these children after the battle of cancer or any illness. for children this is a daily struggle to deal with.once cancer knocks on your door it really never leaves.i know.so make a difference in a childs life today and everyday.i am blessed. sandy

A college friend of ours works at Pixar. They are amazingly creative and kind people- real people, one and all. And the reason they don’t need to take credit or exploit any of this is because you don’t do something kind and wonderful for someone else, expecting anything in return. You do it because the act itself is important.
And it’s good for all of us to remember that good is just good. And it is its own reward.

I basically agree with you. Though whenever I see news like that, I can’t help to think about the time our society wasted with religion, instead of pushing for scientific research. I mean, fact is, our society is stuck and she didn’t get all the help society could’ve provided if it wasn’t for religion. That just makes me sick. ;_;

On a side note, whether it was a publicity stunt or not really doesn’t matter. The girl died for real.

It’s unfair because she was taken from the earth at such a young age and didn’t get the full life that healthy humans can attend. Unfair it a philosophical way. Don’t be all Vulcan about the definition – that’s not what’s meant here. :)

For the “I hate kids” crowd — I haven’t seen this movie yet, but I know that lots of screens will be showing it late at night, and in 3D.

I’m totally looking forward to seeing what Pixar does with 3D — probably won’t be QUITE as impressive as Coraline, but we shall see!

Modern 3D, using the “RealD” system (or Disney’s brand of it), is superb. Very few people “get headaches,” and it’s actually perceived as better quality than normal projection.

(You can read all the details in the various reference webpages, but the simple explanation is that they use the same resolution as the flat movie, but flash the projector bulb four times as often — twice for the left eye, then twice for the right. This all but eliminates any perception of flicker.)

I’m a pediatrician at UCSF in San Francisco and have become a big fan of the Pixar crew. Every time they have a new movie come out, they play it on the children’s ward TV channel right around the day it is released (and sometimes before.) The animators also come to the ward and draw characters for the hospitalized kids as well. Pretty cool dudes… plus they make pretty good movies to boot.

I’m very curious what you mean by this. In the context (enumerating the reasons you don’t find it horrible that she died at such an early age) it sounds like there’s some difference between you and her that makes you less concerned about her death.

Is she a different race than you? If so, would it really have moved you more if she were of your same race?

I’m really curious what you mean by ‘kind’ here. It sounds like it might be a racist statement, but only because I can’t think of something else you might have meant.

I’m not being sarcastic. I’m trying to understand what difference in “kind” makes it easier to be cavalier about this death.

You know?
Usually I shun Pixar movies. They are not bad, neither the kind of thing I am into, or at least not good enough to go to the Theater and stand a bunch of kids throwing popcorn. But this makes me want to go to the movies tonight and buy a ticket for Up.

What a beautiful little girl. So sad. Being a father with a beautiful daughter that age I can’t imagine the grief the family is going through. You want to take the place of Your child but whom ever in the universe is in charge won’t let you. Cancer is such a horrible thing. I send all my condolences and best wishes to the family. I can’t say more. So unfair. Life barely begun, and a death way to soon. Sorry for your loss.

I’m sorry to spoil the party and yes, you may call me heartless on that one.

But this kind of story keeps triggering the same part of my brain that usually warns me of the kind of contradictions, that were most likely produced by either PR or propaganda in order to pry my eyes away from something extremely ugly and making everyone cry foul when you point it out.

So, there is a movie out there. It is finished, tens of millions of dollars were spend on making a movie, instead of handing out – say – antimalarial drugs or mosquito nets that could have prevented at least 1000 no less painful no less tragic but much less reported deaths of people.

Yet, to legally see it outside of the theater, you quite literally have to be dieing to see it.

And this is what I hate the movie industry for, and that includes Pixar.

You don’t become any better by making one exception to a very general, very unfair rule.

What Pixar did here was to use a dieing girl as a piece of good PR, pointing their finger at it, without mentioning at the very least hundreds of other girls in a very comparable situation (dieing and in great pain on the same day that the girl in the article saw the movie) who could have been made just as happy as this girl, if only the movie was available globally (it is not) and outside of cinemas (which it is not either, at least legally).

Please, Pixar, stop abusing my emotions for your benefit. There are people much more worthy of my support and my emotions than you are.

May we assume that you spend 100 percent of your free time trudging through disease-infested jungles to deliver antimalarial drugs to African children (when you’re not bitching about other people’s good deeds on discussion boards, that is)?

No?

Then STFU and accept this story as the example of human compassion and decency that it is.

that may be true. It is also true that a young girl’s life has ended before what should have been her fair time. It is also true that she had some measure of happiness from a gesture that only this company could have done – and did.

Pixar is a class act. They regularly bring DVDs of newly released movies to the children’s hospital where my son is treated. That is where he saw Wall-E, at a time where his immunity was too low to go to a theater.

A Pixar employee heard that he was a big Pixar movie fan and invited him up for a special tour.

Oh my God! This is sooo sad! My heart aches for this little girl and her agonizing death. Why did it have to be so painful ? And if that wasen’t bad enough, she couldn’t watch this movie because of the pain. This story has left me bitter and numb at the same time.

I’m so sorry to spoil your party and yes, you may call me heartless on that one.

But this kind of whiny rant keeps triggering the same part of my brain that usually warns me of the kind of contradictions, that were most likely produced by both bitterness and entitlement in order to pry my eyes away from something extremely touching and making everyone cry when they read it.

So, there is this idiot out there. He’s complaining about convenience when the issue is so much more deeper than the fact that he can’t rent it yet.

MarkM: “i cant stand the Make-A-Wish foundation with their “We’ll grant you any wish as long as it is Going to Disney.””

Years ago, I worked for a marine sightseeing company in Alaska. The Make-a-Wish foundation would often arrange to send families out on our tours, usually 2-3 every summer. From what I have seen working with the Make-a-Wish foundation, they are a wonderful organization. They help make dreams come true for terminally ill children, and their families, whatever those dreams may be. Some of the kids went out with us because they wanted to see a whale, or a glacier, or they just wanted a dream vacation in Alaska. I know of children whose wish was to go to Hawaii, or the Grand Canyon, or just to have a big party thrown for their friends and family. I don’t know where you got the ridiculous idea that the sole purpose of Make-a-Wish is to send sick kids to Disney Land against their will, although their are certainly a lot of kids who do choose to go there.

I’m choked up while reading this at my friends work. After describing this article to her, we decided to see the movie together but she won’t read the article till she’s off work because it’ll probably wreck her like it just did me.

There should be a warning at the top of this post to not read this article if you are in a public spot and don’t want to look nuts to strangers.

Poor girl. That’s no way for anybody to die, especially not a child. It’s good that Pixar took the time and effort to help her see the movie before she went.

For you who are still with us, however, let this be a reminder to never underestimate your creative output. It could mean the world to someone else, just as this movie was important enough to Colby that she postponed her own death for just a little while longer.

Despite how sad this story is, I’m glad that someone made the effort to get to her and make her last wish happen. They didn’t have to do it. They could have procrastinated or made up excuses not to get involved.

No matter how cynical this world is becoming, I can’t deny something decent and human when I see it. I hope this beautiful little girl’s passing was made easier by the knowledge that her loved ones as well as perfect strangers cared about her last moments.

I saw ‘Up’ the day it came out and it is truly a beautiful movie. I was impressed at how honestly and candidly it spoke of mortality and grief, despite being directed to children as well as adults(then again, I admire Pixar for never patronizing their younger audience). Somehow, knowing that this movie was about grief and moving on after death makes it that much more relevant for a dying child. Again, I truly hope she got some comfort out of it.

The adventure book. Oh God, I’m crying now. (If you saw the movie, you’d know why) They did it without even making a press release showing their compassion. That’s amazing. It’s good to see such a big company do the right thing just because it’s the right thing to do.

At least her last few hours were happy. The sad part is she dies less than a day after getting this last wish fulfilled.